Self-destruction

Self-destruction is the process of causing serious physical, mental or emotional harm, damage or even death to yourself. How foolish can you be to engage yourself in destructive activities or behaviour. Why do you sometimes allow yourself to experience destructive emotions such as jealousy and anger, or use addictive substances that can be destructive to our health?

It shouldn’t be difficult to consciously identify your various self-destructive emotions. Some of these emotions are unforgiving, guilt feeling, anger and worry. But one of the most common ones is anger. Negative emotions make you feel dejected, disempowered, deplete your energy and render you susceptible to all kinds of illnesses. Besides, they erode your self-esteem. Burdened with such emotions, you are unlikely to be effective in whatever you do.

Unforgiving people refuse to forgive or find it rather hard to forgive. They relive repeatedly the supposedly harm done to them. This causes deprivation of their peace of mind. It shouldn’t be the harm that is troubling them. It’s how they choose to react that matters. If they don’t perceive it as a harm done to them, there is no harm done to them. Then the question of forgiving or unforgiving does not arise.

A feeling of inadequacy often gives rise to guilt feeling. You feel you are incapable to deal with situations because you are not as good as other people. You judge yourself as not living up to the expectations of certain people. But little do you realize that you can help in other ways that you can. When you are unemployed, you feel guilty of dependency. Your unemployment could be temporary. If not, you can make it your duty to help around the house. You are bed-ridden because of an illness and you feel badly that others have to tend to you. But they know you have not chosen to be ill. They willingly make sure you are comfortable and feeling well.

For whatever reasons your anger is aroused, you place yourself in a position without awareness of what you are doing or saying. Your behaviours and actions are likely to be very foolish because you tend to act impulsively. When you are angry, you cannot think clearly and are therefore unlikely to make a sensible or right decision. You simply lash out or resort violence, only to be filled with remorse later or when you have calm down. It doesn’t help to regret later. Anyone who is easily angered lacks real happiness in life. Removing the anger trait requires you to be a responsible and mature being, and to view situations from a proper perspective.

We attract into our life those things we think and talk about most. Hence, we mustn’t think negatively or worry at all. When we worry about something, our mind is thinking about it all the time. And as mentioned, we tend to attract the things we think about most. The worst thing about worry is that we live through a bad or painful experience or feeling in our imagination before it happens, and it may not happen. Even if it happens, it may not be as bad as we imagine.

Increasingly, more and more people are venting their frustrations by engaging in self-destructive activities? These include taking drugs, and heavy on drinking and smoking. Most of them, before long, are beset with alcohol-related and drug-related problems. They forgo opportunities to live a better life. Some attempt to quit their self-destructive habits but killing those damaging addictions can be very painful because it involves change. But change is what most people try to avoid.

Your mission should be to lead a more meaningful life. To do that, you have to be extremely serious about making changes in yourself. Changes here mean ridding yourself of all the self-destructive behaviours and habits. It is never too late to free yourself from them and prevent yourself from acquiring new ones. Regardless of how old you are, or how long you have the habits or behave in destructive ways, every possible means is available for you to achieve your objective in life.

Most people are self-destructive only at times. Still, it's bad enough. There must be change in oneself as changes bring improvements in their life. Many people are decidedly reluctant to change. The difficult thing in change is to reverse all the previous conditioning. If they have been conditioned for the past so many years to believe that it’s better not to change as change is painful and discomforting, then it’s not easy to replace their deep-seated beliefs with a new belief system.

People fear change because it’s safer and more familiar to stay where they are even though they may not be happy there than to venture into a new environment. In other words, they have to change their whole world. It’s scary. But what people don’t realize is that for them to be non-self-destructive, happy, prosperous and successful, they have to embrace positive change. They have to dispel their fear of change.

On the global scale, manking is facing self-destruction. The world is in a state of relative peace after the Second World War. But weapons – nuclear, biological and chemical – of mass destruction are being produced. This coupled with environmental degradation are moving mankind on the path to self-destruction.